Tuition keeps going up and up

By PETER HONG
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Last week, George Washington University became the first school in the country to charge undergraduates more than 50,000 a year.
The university, which is in Washington, D.C., will charge about 39,000 in tuition plus another 11,000 in mandatory fees (including housing), making it the most expensive in the country. About a year ago, several other private schools pushed their costs above the U.S. median household income, now 46,326. With fee increases consistently exceeding inflation, many more schools can be expected to join the 50,000 club before this fall.
Overall, tuition and fees at four-year institutions increased 35 percent over five years (and that's after being adjusted for inflation), according to the College Board.
What's more, many prestigious schools are raising prices at a time when they have more money than ever. The same day George Washington announced its tuition hikes, for instance, the school boasted that its endowment for the first time had surpassed 1 billion.
So why are they doing it?
University officials claim they need every penny they have just to get by. Tuition and fees, they'll tell you, cover only about two-thirds of what it costs one of our leading private institutions to educate a student. The rest of that cost is covered by the university's endowment, annual gifts and other outside sources.
Schools contend that their expenses mandate steep tuition hikes. Not only do they face typical expenses such as rising employee health-care and benefits costs, but they must invest heavily in state-of-the-art facilities (gyms, libraries, museums and the like) to lure and retain first-rate faculty and students and to support their ambitious academic pursuits.
Misleading pricing
The rising fees are misleading. In fact, the pricing scheme at the nation's most elite schools actually resembles that of a car dealership: Most people don't pay the sticker price, discounts abound and more and more customers borrow heavily to make their payments.
At George Washington, for instance, fewer than half of undergraduates pay full price; about 40 percent of students there receive need-based aid. They are from the vast majority of American families that simply cannot afford to pay close to 50,000 a year.
But that generosity is offset by more self-interested price-cutting as well. George Washington University, like its peer institutions, including Washington University in St. Louis, New York University, Emory or the University of Southern California, also have invested heavily in "merit scholarships" that cut tuition for students whose families otherwise could afford to pay full price. (Roughly 20 percent of students at George Washington didn't qualify for need-based aid but received merit scholarships averaging about 19,290 a student.)
By using discounts to attract students with high grades and test scores, these colleges and many others have enhanced their status in all-important rankings, such as the U.S. News & amp; World Report list.
That's not necessarily such a good policy. Yet such status-climbing is contagious. Merit scholarships were far less common a generation ago. But schools content in the 1980s with being respected now want to be desired -- and this drives up costs for all students and reduces the pot of money available for needy students.
Indeed, enrollment of low-income students at selective private colleges and universities has been steadily dropping.
According to its self-reported data, George Washington spends about 20 million a year on merit scholarships. Presumably, it and other schools with hefty merit scholarship offerings simply could drop the costly awards and use the money to charge everyone less in tuition and fees.
For a college without Ivy League cachet, however, a hefty tuition break can be a powerful recruiting tool. Rather than charging lower tuition, a school that sets an artificially high price and then awards a merit scholarship can tell a student he or she has earned a prize worth thousands of dollars. The student is expected to return the flattery by enrolling.
It seems colleges and universities will continue to hike tuition and fees as long as society is willing to pay, and ordinary students will have a harder time paying their way.
Perhaps, at some point, universities full of great economists, ethicists and business school efficiency experts will figure out how to lower their prices. But so far, our finest institutions, including several with multibillion-dollar endowments, say they don't know the answer.